


Beautiful

by corvidkohai



Category: Final Fantasy VII
Genre: M/M, Puppet Cloud Strife
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 14:19:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19854964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corvidkohai/pseuds/corvidkohai
Summary: The first time Sephiroth calls Cloud beautiful, it's in unexpected circumstances.





	Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WaifuJuju](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaifuJuju/gifts).



> a birthday present to WaifuJuju! Happy Birthday, I hope you like it!!!!

That was _it_.

He’d had it. There had been too many of these strange, clandestine meetings for Cloud’s taste. Too often, he’d come to his senses in the middle of the forest, the city, the village, the desert, the mountains—anywhere, but always alone, and far from camp where he should be. Always, always Sephiroth was there. The biggest problem was, that was where his memory always cut out. He’d see the man, Sephiroth would open his mouth to say _something_ Cloud was sure he wouldn’t want to hear, and then it was all static and white noise and him waking up in bed.

Cloud had taken his precautions. He always woke in the middle of nowhere unarmed. However Sephiroth was calling him out here, he got him to leave his sword behind. So Cloud bought a dagger, which he kept on his person at all times, that Sephiroth wouldn’t know to have him get rid of. He had little training with daggers, and no one else in the party could teach him, but it couldn’t be that hard. It was better than nothing, and when he gripped it, there had been some sort of distant muscle memory. He thought maybe Zack had been trained in them, so long ago, and a little of it had transferred over. He hoped it would be enough.

So when he shook his head and blinked his eyes and found himself standing in a dark cave he could only see by virtue of his mako eyes, he was immediately on guard. It would be better, this time. Whatever had happened before wouldn’t happen again, because he was armed. It would be okay.

He was pretty sure he convinced himself.

He wandered the cave, looking around, spinning in place a few times to take in his surroundings. There was the occasional drip of water from a point of rock or sliding down a wall, the flow of a little river that flowed along the base of one wall, but Sephiroth wasn’t there.

Until he heard footsteps, echoing through the cave. Cloud went toward the entrance the sound was coming from and hid against the wall, so Sephiroth would be greeted by a seemingly empty room. He drew his blade and stilled his lungs as best he could.

“Are we playing children’s games now, Cloud?” Sephiroth called from the tunnel; he could see the empty room already.

Cloud’s answer was to jump him the second he came in sight, grabbing him by the cross-straps and spinning him, tossing him back into the wall Cloud had been up against. He pressed his forearm to Sephiroth’s chest to hold him in place and the tip of his knife to his throat, just beneath the chin, tilting it up slightly. It was a steep angle for Sephiroth to make eye contact with Cloud, but he managed.

“Enough,” Cloud hissed. “Whatever you’re going to say, I don’t want to hear it. You’re going to stop doing this. The only time I want to see you is when I have my sword in my hand to kill you with it, do you understand me?”

There was a long, long moment where Sephiroth didn’t answer, just looked down at Cloud with something indescribable in his eyes. His breath was strangely stilted. He didn’t even raise his hands to push Cloud away, didn’t make any attempt at all, just stayed obediently in place. Cloud told himself it was because the knife at his throat was sufficient threat, but he didn’t quite believe it.

“ _Do you understand me?_ ” Cloud snapped, pressing the dagger forward enough to draw blood. It trickled down the long, pale column of Sephiroth’s throat, swerving as his Adam’s apple bobbed when he swallowed.

“Do you have an idea how beautiful you are?”

Cloud’s mind came to a screeching halt.

“ _What?_ ”

Maybe it was because Cloud was so blindsided he couldn’t think, but Sephiroth stopped being intimidated by the dagger. Instead of pushing him away, however, he ran his fingers gently over Cloud’s cheek, who jerked away from the contact.

“You’re _beautiful_ ,” Sephiroth said. “Always, but especially when you’re angry.”

Cloud recovered enough to bare his teeth. He dug the knife in a little deeper and Sephiroth went still, his hand hovering in the air by Cloud’s face.

“Don’t _call_ me that.”

Cloud thought that, in that moment, Sephiroth might not have been able to stop him from just plunging the dagger all the way in. But he could hardly think about it, he was too distracted by the strange words coming out of his mouth and the even stranger look on his face. He was looking at him with stars in his eyes, like the sun shined because Cloud willed it to. Cloud pulled back on the dagger a little in his hesitance.

“Why not? It’s true. You’re breathtaking when you’re dangerous, and you’re _always_ a danger.”

“To _you_ , because you steal everything from me and are trying to end the world,” Cloud snapped, but it was softened by confusion. This wasn’t how things worked between them. They fought tooth and nail, always. Sephiroth tried to crush his will, to manipulate him, to bend him into whatever shape he desired like hot metal. Cloud struggled, and rebelled, and tried to claw his way to safety. There were strict guidelines for how they behaved with each other, and Sephiroth looking at him awestruck (lovestruck?) because he had a knife at his throat wasn’t one of them.

Or maybe it was. Maybe that was what happened when Sephiroth called him into the wilderness in the middle of the night. Maybe this was the piece he was missing.

Sephiroth laughed lowly, but the sound was fond and indulgent.

“No, Cloud, to _everyone_ , always.”

“Because you like to try and force me to hurt other people, maybe.”

“You are an actual threat to _me_ , which makes you all but danger incarnate. It’s written in your blood and bones. It’s something you can’t take out of you anymore; much as I am.”

“Don’t say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like—it’s _cells_ , that’s _all_.”

“It’s a part of me that is a part of you now,” Sephiroth said, his eyes roaming over Cloud’s face. “It’s what makes you as much mine as you are beautiful and dangerous.”

“I’m not _yours_ ,” Cloud bit, and the sharp tang of anger on his tongue snapped him out of it. He made to press the dagger forward again, only he found he couldn’t.

He tried again, but trying to move his hand was like trying to move the Sister Ray by hand.

Cloud’s eyes shot from where he was looking at his immovable hand up to Sephiroth, who looked down at him with a smile that was still too soft for what was happening.

Sephiroth lifted a hand and pressed Cloud’s away from his throat, and this time, the hand went easily. Cloud tried to fight it, to stay in place, but his body responded to Sephiroth’s touch better than it did to his own mind.

Sephiroth took his hand between his own, holding it in the space between them. One by one, he peeled Cloud’s fingers away from the hilt, until the knife clattered to the floor.

“You always have been, and always will be, mine. And you are, without a doubt, the most _beautiful_ thing I will ever call my own.”

“I’m not a _thing_.”

Sephiroth held Cloud’s hand in his own, his thumb tracing the palm. He slid his free hand up to cup Cloud’s cheek. Cloud wanted to struggle, to pull away, but he found himself leaning into the contact, like a cat nuzzling into a petting hand. Sephiroth looked down at him in infinite fondness.

“What I love the most, Cloud,” Sephiroth said, “is taking all your anger for me away from you and turning it on something else. Then I can watch you be gorgeous and deadly, but when you look at me, it will be with your heart in your eyes.”

Flashes came back to Cloud. Blood on his hands, washing away in a river. Wounded sounds, that could have been animal or just animalistic but human in the end. He wondered, now, what Sephiroth had gotten him to do, all those times he’d called him out here. He’d assumed it had been nothing, because there were no repeats of Nibelheim, no towns razed to the ground, and his team members were safe. He couldn’t imagine what Sephiroth’s goals might be otherwise. But it was clear some sort of bloodshed had happened. Had it been against townsfolk, or against monsters? Was Sephiroth building up to something, trying to build Cloud’s tolerance for being controlled, to see how far he could be pushed?

“What have you done?” Cloud asked, but everything seemed to be going foggy. There was a strange sense of distance, a humming underneath his skin. Tension slipped from his shoulders.

“Nothing you didn’t ask for,” Sephiroth said, running his thumb along Cloud’s cheek.

“But did I want it, or did you put the idea in my head?” Cloud mumbled, blinking slowly, his eyelids suddenly feeling heavy. Without realizing what he was doing, he turned his face, pressing his cheek into Sephiroth’s hand with a sigh.

When he looked up, his eyes were mako green.

“Does it matter, in the end?” Sephiroth asked.

Cloud hummed and said, “No, I guess it doesn’t.”

Sephiroth smiled, the expression affectionate, and dipped his head. Cloud tilted his face up and stood on his toes, his hand going to Sephiroth’s shoulder for balance, to meet him halfway for the kiss. 

When Cloud sank back to his heels, Sephiroth watched closely, until heavy-lidded eyes that mirrored his own looked back at him.

“ _Beautiful_.”


End file.
